If you are interested in your health and its development, one simple measure – which many people start, and all too many stop, with – is your weight.

As so many simple measures, it’s easy, simple, and somewhat wrong a measure to focus on.

Thus, a daily weigh-in sounds like something only a weight-conscious, diet-chasing person would do, and it is a bad measure if one focuses only on the weight.

A daily weigh-in can be a good measure of more than just weight trends, however – especially if you use a “scale” like a Withings Body Scan for it.

Weighty Matters

First off, don’t get criticism of weight as a measure wrong the way it’s usually done:

No amount of body positivity can deny the reality of obesity being a health problem.

Being slightly overweight may be better for health and lifespan than being underweight. Being heavyset or having curves isn’t going to kill you, and I really wish we weren’t so fast to judge people by their looks.

Still, if you are average weight in nowadays’ societies that tend towards obesity, you are overweight and probably in some health trouble.

If not now, then issues are likely in the future.

BMI, body-mass index, is a bad measure, too, and its common criticism shows the weakness of such criticisms:

Sure, a body builder would have a problematic BMI – but that problem only applies if you are a bodybuilder. Are you?

It’s a measure made as an easy value that has some veracity for the majority of an average population. Outliers do not somehow mean that you can completely ignore it if it tells you that you are overweight.

Actually, the real reason BMI is a bad measure is because it can lull you into thinking you’re alright when you can have an okay BMI while your vascular fat is too high – and that is known to be a real health concern!

That said, yes, you should not just focus on your weight.

What More the Body Scan Can Do

Withings’ Body Scan is about much more than weight. And it shows how much more a “weigh-in” can do, and how it can help on a journey of discovery about your health and your physical self.

The Body Scan does, of course, measure your weight. It is a scale, after all.

Differences already begin here, however: It will also show you your weight trend. Or, if you are concerned about your weight but don’t want to worry every day, you can set it up to measure your weight, but not display it.

Either way, the data gets saved to its companion smartphone app.

This scale can also, however, go on to determine your body composition, record (and analyze) an ECG and the pulse wave velocity of your heartbeat in order to give you a vascular age, and determine a measure of your nerve health.

Body, Heart, and Nerve Snapshots

The snapshots of these data points help gain insight into health in terms of the following aspects:

• The working of one’s heart through the ECG analyzing the regularity of heart rate rhythm,
• Vascular health, i.e. the state of one’s blood vessels, through the pulse wave velocity,
• Nerve health,
• Weight,
• Visceral fat,
• Muscle mass,
• Water.

Body Composition: Fat, Muscle, Water

Talking of weight or BMI and the bad measures they can be, visceral fat and muscle mass are of particular interest:

Belly fat may annoy you because six-pack abs are seen as prettier and a measure of some kind of success, but it’s the fat within one’s abdomen, around the organs – visceral fat – that is an actual health concern.

Thus, not having too much visceral fat and perhaps changing one’s nutrition to reduce it if it’s too much (or on the increase) is probably a good idea if one wants to extend healthspan.

If you try to diet and train, you may well end up on the eternal yo-yo of dieting, weight loss, and weight gain after giving up on dieting. Or exercising, not losing weight, and despairing… while perhaps, you were actually getting fitter and more muscular.

The analysis of muscle mass and water alongside fat mass and visceral fat helps with that.

It helps you know if your diet is actually just making you lose weight by losing water or muscle or if your training is not helping with weight loss because you are gaining muscle mass.

The greatest value of a daily weigh-in like this lies not with the health snapshot it can provide, but with the trends that one can see over time.

Funnily, the Withings app could make you aware of that if you thought about things a bit.

Upon opening it, it presents you with the “Latest Measurements.”

In my case, since I don’t have a Withings ScanWatch or similar, most values shown here are imported from other services (workouts, steps, average HR,…).

And those are just snapshot values of something that happened during that day.

It’s okay so see it, but it doesn’t really mean much in the larger scheme of things.

Fitness Takes Time…

The best dieting is not any fad, anything quick, it is a diet in the sense of a way of eating. The Mediteranean diet, the diets of people in the Blue Zones of longevity (in good health)… or SAD, the standard American Diet.

You will feel better or worse with it, but it can also mislead you.

I feel good on a diet of pastries and chocolate, but it’s not going to do me good in the long run. (Admittedly, I see that more from a CGM to check about glucose metabolism than in the measures from a/the scale.)

The best fitness program is not a twice-weekly visit to the gym for 15 minutes of HIT, it’s having an active lifestyle.

Sitting in the office to only sit in a car driving to the gym to sit on a stationary bike isn’t going to cut it.

You won’t run fast marathons if you walk everywhere, but you will manage to finish slow ultramarathons. Believe me, it’s what I’ve done all too often!

… and Trends Show Progress (or Problems)

The BodyScan automatically syncs the data it records with the companion Withings smartphone app, and this becomes particularly interesting as a case of seeing life as a journey.

Data points, collected over time, form a picture, after all. They show trends.

Some of the more specialized values calculated by a Withings Body Scan are problematic, as in: They require more careful consideration and more learning – but hey, microexploration is all about that!

Vascular Age

Vascular age (now also on the Oura ring), for example, is something of a black box value. How various devices calculate it is not entirely clear, and neither is its usefulness.

There seems to be some credibility to such a value, but even then, what do you do with it?

If you should also lose weight and have an unhealthy diet, okay, you would probably do your heart health and blood vessels a good deed by eating healthier, exercising more, and perhaps shedding some weight that way – and that’s a problematic issue, too.

Whether diet and exercise can really change weight well and long-term is a question with a much more complicated answer than we often assume.

Then again, better diets and more movement are definite good recommendations that we often fail to adhere to!

Moreover, the type of exercise recommended for heart health is the same type of exercise that you should be doing for good endurance improvements, so there’s a decent chance that you could do yourself some good in several ways – for fitness and for metabolic health and lifespan – through a focus on that.

My heart and vascular system got checked by medical professionals recently who gave me the all-clear.

The Withings app is telling me that my vascular age is in alignment with my actual age… but the Body Scan was sometimes saying that it’s 48-52, which is above my age, before it, too, reverted to showing a vascular age in line with (or slightly below, given the range) my actual age.

The Oura ring, now that it shows a vascular age, is giving me a definitely lower-than-actual value.

Frankly, I have no concrete idea what to do with this information, nor even how to interpret the differences – but, see below.

Nerve Health

The nerve health measure is a similar matter – and might make things clearer:

It gives you a Nerve Health Score, based on the reaction of the sweat glands in your feet to stimulation of the nerves.

The score itself, on its own, won’t actually tell you anything meaningful, as long as it is in the okay range.

The value is in seeing the score over time.

If it declines, it could indicate an issue with the peripheral autonomous nervous system, potentially a neuropathy – and seeing that would mean that you’d better go see a doctor and get checked, seeing that early would be better than seeing it too late, when complications could ensue.

Cardio measures are similar.

Vascular age by itself may or may not be helpful. Your ECG should normally be normal. But if ECG detects an issue, if vascular age keeps rising more than biological age, it would be high time to get checked by more than just a scale.

If I could prevent an uptick in vascular age, that would be nice – and I’ll certainly try and keep up with fitness training, try and get better about my diet.

Using Trends as Guidance

This returns us right back to the easier things to measure, understand, and do something about – and the value of seeing trends.

Trends show how we are developing in some respects, and the trends in the data that a Body Scan collects are really interesting and helpful, if only we use them:

Weight in general tends to trend upwards with age.

Muscle mass definitely trends downwards, with problematic consequences. (Loss of muscle means loss of strength means less balance, less ability to do things… less life in your years.)

Thus, it is helpful to be made aware of our own trends in that, to see if we are following any such downward spiral or doing something right, keeping up the fight.

Keep your weight stable, keep or get body fat percentage on the lower end and keep or raise your percentage of muscles, and you are doing good.

As you age, in particular.

Long-Term Experiences with the Withings Body Scan

Talking of long-term issues, I only have to mention one thing:

My experience with the Body Scan and with Withings customer service has been a strange one.

For about a year after I got the scale, I was able to do daily weigh-ins in the morning and it all worked perfectly.

After the birth of our second child, our home situation changed and I couldn’t get on the scale often.

Recently, about two years after I got the scale, I have been trying to do regular weigh-ins again – and whether the scale works perfectly or fails to measure some values was pretty random.

Sometimes I stepped on in and everything worked perfectly.

Most of the time, however, I didn’t get a pulse wave velocity measured.

ECG recording was sometimes poor, as the scale itself would then display; it just recorded squiggles. Other times, sometimes just a minute later, the ECG recording was perfectly fine.

Withings customer service made me jump through hoops like some circus animal, from sharing exported ECG recordings to taking photos of the position in which I stand on the scale, to make sure it’s all correct (as if I didn’t have a year of perfect recordings).

They asked if I cleaned the scale enough, then pointed out that cleaning with any sort of chemical could damage the delicate electronics, which I would believe to be a possibility if its operation were consistently problematic.

It took some three months’ worth of back-and-forth with them until they finally decided that I should ship my scale back and would get a replacement in return.

That all now worked flawlessly, and so does the new Body Scan.

I still don’t know how my body fat ever got as low as it is, which had initially made me wonder if the Body Scan could possibly be right.

(Sure, I run around a lot and try to be good with my training, but my diet isn’t particularly good and my training – now with two children, even more so – isn’t exactly regular.)

Lab fitness testing and health check-ups, however, found that the values from the Withings Body Scan are correct.

I like the adventures I have (and the regular, real training) with sports/outdoor watches, but for overall insight, they matter rather less.

Aside from wearables for sleep and general tracking, thus, the Withings Body Scan scale continues to be one of my favorite tools for keeping up with trends over the longer term – and those matter rather more, aiming to keep up and be there for my family.

Final Displays

For the sake of completeness:

If you set the Withings BodyScan up that way, it will also show you the basic weather forecast and air quality for your location.

And when done, there’s this:

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